JD

JD's Blog, a place where sight and sound have no meaning, where time and space are illusions, and where a DJ air personality posts his slightly off-kilter take on this, that, and the other thing.

I've loved radio since I was a kid and consider myself extremely lucky to get paid to do it. I'm a 2002 graduate of the DC campus of the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, I play several musical instruments and write books for fun. And I'm a huge fan of the Philly teams: the Phillies, Eagles, Flyers and Sixers.

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My Hat and Considerations Re First Impressions

by JDposted May 29 2013 10:36PM

Do you ever find yourself making assumptions about people based on what you would consider to be silly criteria?

This is not an out of the blue question. Today as I was leaving home to come to work I grabbed my old Dale Earnhardt Jr hat and put it on. I noticed that the hat was a little dirty, a little beat up, and for just a moment I wondered if anyone I encountered during my day would think anything of it. Then I realized, well, the people here at the station already know full well I'm an oddball, and anyone I see in most of my other stops is likely to be wearing a beat up old cap themselves. So I dismissed the thought.

However the notion would not stay gone. It kept coming back to me. I was reminded of a scene I saw in a movie once, I think it was Joh Waters' Serial Mom. The titular mom sees a woman wearing white shoes after Labor Day and offs her. An extreme reaction, natch. But it got me thinking about my own experiences of making a judgment about some random person I saw based on something inconsequential, and I realized I've done it before. Perhaps you have too.

Of course, it's something we try not to do. But first impressions are almost impossible to harness...you see someone, and you think something based on how they look, how they act, how they speak, all of the above or some combination thereof. Sometimes our first impressions are dead-on, sometimes they totally wrong.

So if you see me walking around in my raggedy old #88 hat, be kind. It's perfectly broken in. Cheers.